If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
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If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more now
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Category: Best New Community
Community: Paypal
Launch Date: October 27, 2009
Submitted by: Paypal Community Manager AmandaK
Since its launch in 1998, PayPal has been a global leader in online payments, providing customers in over 190 countries the most loved way to pay and get paid online.
In addition to traditional online customer support options, we recently introduced an entirely new way for customers to interact with PayPal – and each other!
PayPal Community Help Forum (PPCHF) is a peer-to-peer community for PayPal members to come together and help one another.
Since its debut in October 2009, the response from our customers has been active and lively.
Learning about online commerce in the fast-paced, ever growing world of the Internet can be daunting. But by sharing experiences, tips, and advice with other customers, the help forum has truly embraced the meaning of the word “community”.
Visitors from around the world – novice, intermediate, and experienced alike – have made PPCHF a popular virtual social network, regardless of one’s abilities, product knowledge, or even geographical location.
New members use the forum to find hints and suggestions from those who already use PayPal, and experienced customers chat about ways to make payment processing even easier. eBay members learn what happens after an auction closes, how to get paid, or how to send money overseas. Online merchants discuss business-related topics, such as PayPal integration, best practices, or SEO and sales strategies. Many PayPal members use PPCHF daily to share their passion and insight with others. Already having posted more than 3,000 times, top contributor “skier” not only responds to questions but also provides feedback and suggestions to PayPal about improving service and the PPCHF itself.
In return, the forum helps us discover “hot button” and emerging issues, and gives us even greater insight into how our members use PayPal. By offering an online face and personality, our community members feel that their feedback is valued, and we’ve generated positive word of mouth. In only five months, nearly 50,000 PayPal members have registered for PPCHF, with an average of 550 logging in per day.
With more than 5 million searches and 10,000 threads, members have embraced PPCHF as the new way to quickly and easily find answers to commonly asked questions and learn how others use PayPal to their advantage.
The potential for this young community is just beginning to show itself!

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
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If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best New Community & Most Innovative Community
Community: Giff Gaff
Launch Date: October 15, 2009
Submitted by: Giff Gaff Community Manager, Vincent
I'm nominating the giffgaff community because since the day we launched, the community has not stopped baffling me with its behaviour. Never have I met a community which is so extremely on topic, which fulfils the role it was set up for so completely, where we cannot detect any spam and where the users are so extremely helpful to each other I feel positively nauseated
giffgaff was specifically set up to get its community involved in all aspects of the business (mobile phone network). So we launched our community even before our product was available, in order to start gathering feedback on what we would launch. After launch, the community was to take up the role of our customer service (which they did tremendously well) and continue to provide feedback on our product and service. We have no call centres at all, as all our customers questions are answered by our community (except for billing). This has worked so well that since launch we've only had to escalate two questions in total, out of the hundreds posted by our members (questions get automatically escalated after 24 hours with no reply). And we've had an average response time of 900 minutes to any questions posted in January, which is just incredible.
We continue to work with our community involving them in decisions on how we price our products by asking what they think is fair, and incorporating their feedback in product changes and using the Ideas Exchange as part of our internal business strategy. We're working very hard to make sure the community feels involved with giffgaff and everything we do. This shows in our participation rates (in January an amazing 30% of newly registered users visited our community pages) and in how we've attracted super users, one of whom spends seven hours a day, seven days a week answering questions. But don't take my word for it, the community also feels our approach is different and sets us apart from the majority. Here are two choice quotes: tamino wrote: You've answered my questions faster than if often takes to get through to a human in a call centre. Member service 1, call centres 0! trick202: GG has the potential to be different. They could almost do with a Che image on the site - and a Rage Against the Machine track playing!
If you think the Giff Gaff community is worthy of winning Best New Community, then give it a vote. Voting is open on the Lithosphere until the end of March this year. Winners will be announced at the LiNC customer conference. Read our blog for more information on the Social CRM Excellence Awards

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
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If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best Community Anecdote or Story
Community: National Instruments
Launch Date: November 15, 2004
Submitted by: NI Web Project Engineer Laura
The National Instruments (NI) Discussion Forums host thousands of discussions with tips, tricks and solutions to the most common problems that engineers all over the world face.
Every online community is created with the hopes of one day reaching people who have a shared passion for a company’s products and services.
For National Instruments, that day happened when Ben Rayner reached 10,000 posts in the NI Discussion Forums. With this milestone, Ben became the third ever “Knight of NI.” This highly coveted title positioned Ben as a trusted advisor on the discussion forums.
But what the community didn’t know is that before Ben joined the discussion forums he had often struggled with text based programming early in his career due to his dyslexia.
Ben posted, for the entire community to see, that “LabVIEW [the NI flagship software] is a gift from God to the Dyslexic.” “Without it”, Ben continued, “I’d probably be designing optics in a back cube somewhere, counting down the days until I retire. As it stands today, I hope to help the LabVIEW developers of tomorrow when I retire.”
And with that Ben described the entire purpose of the discussion forums, to help build a community of like minded individuals who can share information that helps change people’s lives and impact the future. When the first NI Discussion Forum member reached 5,000 posts the community members voted that they should be given the rank of rank “Zealous” in the community.
During this time, the community members continued to bring up the idea that one should be able to become a “Knight of NI,” based on the community's love for the movie Monty Python & the Holy Grail.
The “Knight of NI” title was finally implemented for community members who reached the 10,000 post milestone. “Knights of NI” were to receive a shrubbery from NI for their hard work and dedication.
Along with becoming a Knight of NI, Ben received his shrubbery and even held a knighting ceremony at his own home!
For a regular community member, reaching 10,000 posts is an extraordinary accomplishment, but for Ben Rayner becoming a Knight of NI was something that he, and the rest of the NI community, will never forget. In fact there are over 230 replies to the congratulatory post for Ben reaching this milestone mark.
Ben's current post count is over 11,350. Wait 11,351...2...3.

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best Community Usecase
Community: TVG
Launch Date: July 7, 2009
Submitted by: TVG Community Manager zoerem
The TVG Community has made a measurable effect on TVG’s revenue.
The Community has attracted high profile customers who wager on www.TVG.com, and furthermore, the community has increased the amount that those customers wager.
See some stats below:
Of our 13,000 community members, 64% of them have wagering accounts with TVG.com
Community members account for 20% of TVG’s overall handle (handle = total amount wagered)
Members of the community have 36% higher average handle than non-community members
Looking at community members before and after joining the community, we can demonstrate that membership in the community has positively impacted wager activity
Y/Y avg. handle growth rates were negative for most of 2009 prior to the Community Launch (July 09). After joining the Community, 4 out of the first 5 Community Classes demonstrated positive growth rates
Collectively, Community Members achieved higher handle growth rates than Non-Community Members
See the attached chart for reference

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
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If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best Community ROI Usecase
Community: Best Buy
Submitted by: Best Buy Community Manager: Gina
Conversations are happening every moment on the internet about the Best Buy brand and the products we sell. About two years ago we decided to join the conversation and engage customers both on our own Community as well as the blogosphere.
Best Buy provides a bilingual Community "Best Buy Unboxed" that integrates a forum, Twitter, blogs and videos to connect customers with other product users as well as our Blueshirt and Geek Squad Agents to create solutions together. Technology products continue to increase in complexity producing the epiphenomenon of techno-stress.
At Best Buy we realize that we cannot provide all the answers; what can provide is a platform to aggregate information and facilitate connections.
Whether it is customer to customer or customer to employee, we recognize that knowledge is often contained in pieces. By facilitating connections our customers are able to have both pre- and post-purchase support.
A recent analysis of the ROI of community determined that factoring in call deflection and sales influence, the Best Buy Community provides about a $5 million dollar benefit to the organization. In 2009, the Best Buy Community assisted over 2.5 million customers who posted over 79,000 messages and read over 81 million messages.
While there is a dedicated team of Community Connectors who regularly engage with customers on the Best Buy Community, about 95% of the conversations on the community are peer-to-peer support.
Read Lithium's new Best Buy Casestudy

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best Community Anecdote/Story
Community: TVG
Launch Date: July 7, 2009
Submitted by: TVG Community Manager zoerem
A few cliques developed early on in the TVG Community and as the months progressed the defined friendships between many members became obvious.
But there were two particular community members who seemed to be getting quite close. After much speculation from various members, rumors started circulating. Two very prominent members were at the center of the gossip and before long, the truth came out: Novice and Augustwest were in love. They declared their passionate love for each other in a post entitled “Love Story: Novice and Augustwest.” It all started with a private message on the TVG Community. One led to thousands, and PMs led to emails. After a month or so, they were planning to meet up in person and take a vacation together. When they met face to face they realized that the strength of their love wasn’t limited to virtual reality.
They were truly in love. The announcement to the community of their successful relationship did nothing to settle the gossip. It just caused the subject matter to vary slightly. Amusing posts were started with titles such as “If Augustwest and Novice were stallion and mare... what would their foal be named?”
And surprising gratitude was given under posts entitled “Why did you join the TVG Community.” The next round of posts about the two members were speculations on when we’d hear wedding bells and see Novice and AugustWest live on TVG saying “I do.”
While marriage isn’t on the forefront of the minds of the happy couple, they have moved in together and thank the TVG Community for allowing them to find the love of their lives.
Check out some posts here: http://community.tvg.com/t5/TVG-Viewer-Mailbox/LOVE-STORY-Novice-and-Augustwest/m-p/49147

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best New Community
Community: TVG
Launch Date: July 7, 2009
Submitted by: TVG Community Manager zoerem
The TVG Community officially launched in July of 2009 and since has become the fastest growing horse racing community in existence.
With approximately 13,000 members the TVG Community is also well on its way to becoming the largest horse racing community out there. Our biggest competitor, Pace Advantage, has just 13,300 members and is growing at a much slower rate.
See the attached chart for a direct comparison of our growth rates. Here are some quick stats on the TVG Community:
13,000 members
~ 7,000 weekly visits
~ 300,000 weekly page views
Over 4,000 weekly posts
The TVG Community didn’t get to where it is now without reason. We have been working diligently with Lithium Technologies to provide the best features for our members. As you can see in the attached screen shot, our homepage is full of customized modules to make it more appealing to our customer base. Some of our most prominent features include:
Central Flash Module, updated on a weekly basis
Twitter feed featuring tweets from our TV channel’s on air talent
Unique ranking structure pertinent to horse racing
Video and Photo pages featuring various races
Blog page with TVG Talent Blogs and guest blogs from prominent industry bloggers
Superuser program entitled The Turf Club, for our most prominent users
TVG Knowledge Base in existence for less than one month and already 140 articles
We also have the great opportunity to cross promote on our horse racing television network and our online wagering site www.TVG.com. Tune in to TVG to see our Community commercial shown every hour on our television channel, and the screen shot of our parent site www.TVG.com, with a Community tab and promotional graphic. With all of our new features, many more in the works, and our great customer base, we plan to keep on growing at such a fast rate!

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
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If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best New Community
Community: Aflac
Launch Date: October 24, 2009
Submitted by: Aflac Community Manager NateKlein
The Aflac Duck has been so many places that we thought, why not send him on a swim? That's when the Duck Pond was formed. The Duck Pond is a closed community forum where Aflac's online billing accounts can connect, share and learn from other Aflac account administrators by asking questions, providing answers and submitting ideas online.
In less than four months, more than 18,000 account administrators have joined the conversation ... that's 10.2 percent of our eligible accounts out there quacking about Aflac! They have given us some great ideas - three of which are now on our strategic roadmap for implementation during the 2Q 2010. These suggestions will reduce call volume, enhance the customer experience and improve account retention.
We have posted blogs to help Aflac accounts improve the customer experience and blogs that include tips on using social media. Soon, we'll start the conversation on how to make corporate sponsorships work for our accounts. In addition to our featured blogs, the many threads have allowed our accounts to solve issues, raise concerns and sing the praises of Aflac's various services.
Overall, there have been more than 117,000 page views, over 32,000 message views and over 200 message posts -amazing considering Aflac accounts usually visit the site once a month to pay their bills.
Lastly, Aflac has to put some dollar figures to this analysis to make it worthwhile:
Along with our web redesign and the ability to showcase how secure online payment transactions are via the Duck Pond, there has been a three percentage point increase in the number of customers that pay online.
Although this increase may be small, its effect is large, because moving that figure in a positive direction provides Aflac with additional annual cost avoidance for processing and materials of more than $95,000 - and that number continues to climb!

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best Community ROI Usecase
Community: Verizon
Submitted by: Verizon Community Project Manager Hollyb
The Verizon forums http://forums.verizon.com/ has quickly evolved into something much more than a technical support forum. In fact, the forums are now touching many parts of the company in some way and are rapidly becoming more and more integrated into the overall communication strategy. In 2009, the media relations team began blogging in the community, using the Verizon blogs as a tool to release company updates, information and press releases.
The blogs serve as a primary touch point to the media as well as conversation portals with our customers about important topics such as how Verizon as a company is helping local communities, or the latest advancements in wireless technologies.
More specifically, the Verizon at Home blog is now one of the first places consumers and media can look for news of upgrades to existing services or announcements of new Verizon products and services. The Responsibility Blog is a place for Verizon to showcase our corporate responsibility and share how the company has contributed to foster improvements in education, the environment, health care, accessibility and Internet safety. The Verizon Small Business blog provides relevant news, trends and service information aimed at helping small businesses increase their bottom-line. In addition to the blog, The Verizon Small Business group is also taking advantage of the forums by starting small business discussions and providing more ways for small businesses to promote themselves through the forums. The forums have also become a center point of other social media activity happening online. In addition to the linkages between Facebook and YouTube, Verzion has implemented a Twitter integration which lets members interact with Twitter directly from the forums. This integration allows Verizon’s technical support team to actually find customer questions and problems happening on the social web, and pull them back into the forums for discussion and resolution. In 2010, a customer Advisory Panel was formed with the use of the forums. This panel serves as a private focus group so Verizon can get real feedback from our customers on products, services and ideas. The Verizon forums have become a place where Verizon managers and executives can have two way conversations with customers, understand needs, and respond quickly. It has evolved beyond a technical help forum and become integrated into a core piece of Verizon's communication strategy with its customers.

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best Community Business Integration
Community: HP
Submitted by: HP Director of Community LoisT
It was a crazy time at HP. Windows 7 was shipping any day, and we were busy getting ready for the onslaught of questions and calls that would come pouring in. There were thousands of posts on the new OS on the HP Support Forum, and Windows 7 had been the most searched on topic on the community for the last six months. It was the perfect time for our executives to challenge us to find a way to use the community to help customers. After looking at all of our options, we decided that we needed to have a party – a Welcome Windows 7 party. We went out to our support engineers and got them to agree to come to the party, which we hosted on the forum. More than 75 HP Windows 7-trained experts from around the world signed up from HP’s desktops, notebooks, and printers organizations for the 24 hour event. Since the whole focus of this event was Windows 7, we invited Microsoft to join us. They promised several engineers. The day of the event was set for the first Thursday in November. There was so much interest in what would be happening on the Forum that we broke the record of the highest number of page views on Wednesday, the day before. The new record was short lived. The day of the event dawned. HP engineers sat in conference rooms made into make shift labs. They worked online with customers to recreate problems, direct customers to the correct drivers, and answer hundreds of questions. Again we saw a record number of page views on the site. While customers raved about the help they got, the support engineers were even more enthusiastic.
They enjoyed helping our customers, and discovered several issues that they hadn’t known about as well as support documents that needed to be created or improved. The party, which we called Windows 7 Expert Day, was so successful that we held two additional events. The discoveries made during the Expert Days saved the company millions, and helped countless customers. Not bad for a day’s work.

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Most Innovative Community
Community: Future Shop
Submitted by: Future Shop Community Manager, LauraB
Made up of over 130,000 Future Shop Product Experts, customers and vendors, the Community Forum has connected tech-enthusiasts and newbies from all across Canada and facilitated more than 220,000 posts around technology news, products, and services. Unique to the Future Shop Community is the Avatar, who is known as Aaron in the English Community and Fred in the French.
The Avatar serves as a guide to the Future Shop online experience by searching the site and the community for answers to technology related questions. Since launching in June 2007, the Avatar has facilitated close to 9.5 million searches, with 36,000 questions getting submitted through to the Community if the answer couldn't be found in the search results. The Avatar acts as a virtual host who communicates with the visitor via pre-recorded videos. Users can ask the Avatar a question and it will search the Community, Buying Guides, Tech Spotlight articles, and Recently Asked Questions.
The Avatar element is especially unique as it connects a different group of customers - a group who might not be as willing to join a community, but still want to benefit from the large knowledge-base - to the larger group who are likely to be able to provide an answer to their question. Aaron and Fred are positioned as Future Shop Product Experts with the goal of taking the in-store experience and expanding it to the online space. Both Avatar personalities have several Easter Egg videos that are popular searches with customers (try asking Aaron to "dance" or "sing"). They are accessible from the futureshop.ca homepage and the Expert Advice page. The Avatar has facilitated millions of customers in finding solutions to their techno-stress in an innovative and entertaining way. Avatar: EN: http://www.futureshop.ca/learnmore/LMhome.asp FR: http://www.futureshop.ca/learnmore/LMhome.asp?logon=&langid=FR Community: EN: http://www.futureshopforums.ca FR: http://forumsfutureshop.ca

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more now
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Category: Best Community Business Integration
Community: Staples
Submitted by: Staples Program Manager, Retail Communications Alissa
Behind the Button is an internal community for Staples store managers to connect with one another, solve problems, share best practices, and provide feedback.
A vital resource for 6,000 store managers across the US, Behind the Button has become an integrated tool in the day to day operations of stores and has changed the way the Staples Home Office communicates with them. In addition to the store managers and field leadership, a group of Home Office subject matter experts representing functional areas such as merchandising, operations, HR, and marketing are active members of the community. These Home Office experts have proven to be a key benefit of the community, providing answers to store questions and using feedback gathered from the site to refine programs and influence change. Senior leaders at Staples love to leverage Behind the Button for its Live Chat application - it has been most popular with Divisional Senior Vice Presidents as it gives them the ability to have personal interactions with all the stores in their regions when travel for face to face meetings is not possible.
There have been more than 25 Live Chat events on the community in 18 months. From the President of US Retail to initiative leaders looking for feedback on a new program, Chats have become a go-to communication vehicle to connect with stores across the country in one action-packed, hour-long session. The newest feature of Behind the Button, "Inspired Ideas", will further integrate the community into Staples business when it launches in May. The new ideas module will replace the company's static Idea Exchange program with a more dynamic application that leverages social collaboration on the community. After all, it's the associates behind the Easy Button that know the business the best, and the Behind the Button community gives them a voice, not only to help each other be successful in their jobs, but to impact change within the company. In the words of one Behind the Button user to his fellow community members: "This community is in my opinion, the most underrated, valuable resource that we have... And every post that every one of you put up is a testament to the culture that makes this company successful."

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o...
See more...

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!
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Category: Best Community Business Integration
Community: Future Shop
Submitted by: Future Shop Community Manager, LauraB
The Future Shop community has helped build a self-service knowledge base that customers tap into to find answers to product information questions, helping them make more informed purchase decisions and get post-purchase support. Facilitating this experience is the Avatar (Aaron in the English Community and Fred in the French) which has introduced millions of Canadians to the Community Forum. Present on the homepage of futureshop.ca and in our Expert Advice section, the Avatar is synced up with all of the content on the website (Buying Guides, Tech Spotlight articles, FAQs) as well as the content created by the Community (forums and blogs).
If the customer isn't able to find the answer to their question in the resources served up to them, they can choose to submit their query to the forum where our community of experts can review and provide specific advice. Once a member with the role of "ExpertUser" responds (this is gained after meeting a certain set of criteria), the customer submitting a question receives an email letting them know their question has been replied to.
Relevant discussions and blog posts are also served up on each category page of the website, exposing shoppers to helpful content provided by the Community. Every week, a timely thread and blog get featured out in the Future Shop newsletter, which has over 1 million subscribers across Canada. In addition to the Community being physically integrated into the transactional website, it has also been integrated into the business rhythms of many departments. Marketing not only leverages the community to amplify promotions, reach out for feedback and post communication regarding contests, in-store visits, and other events. For example, the project manager of a new marketing program tapped the community to suggest program features and names. Since launching the Tech Blog in May 2009, it has become integrated in the business rhythm of our marketing team to leverage as an avenue to launch new products. Working with the vendor community, they are able to secure product demos and insider information for our team of independent bloggers to write about. Avatar: http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/ResearchCentre/AskAnExpertHome.aspx Tech Blog: http://www.futureshopforums.ca/t5/Tech-Blog/bg-p/TechBlog